Several major film directors have in recent years made films based on events fresh out of the newspaper headlines, mainly social/cultural developments related to the Internet (e.g. David Fincher´s The Social Network, 2010) or political scandals (Roman Polanski´s Ghost Writer, also 2010) or both (Bill Condon´s The Fifth Estate, 2013). Welcome to New York is Abel Ferrara´s first incursion in this genre, if that´s what it is, but is a film squarely rooted in the director´s usual universe.
Welcome to New York is Abel Ferrara´s 20st feature film. His films have predominantly been set either in the criminal demimonde or the film industry, often with heavy sexual undertones and markedly catholic connotation/iconography, the most famous probably being The Bad Lieutenant (1992, remade to much better effect by Werner Herzog in 2009 under the title The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans). Welcome to New York tells with very thin disguise (so thin it´s probably only to deflect prosecution) the story of the fall from grace of former IMF General Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK, played by Gerard Depardieu), whose political career was cut short in 2011, when he was front-runner for the French Presidency, by a case of sexual harassment involving a hotel maid in New York.
Strauss-Kahn is portrayed as an insatiable sex maniac: the moment he arrives in New York he is escorted by elegant stewardesses and hotel assistants to a hotel suite where a group of acquaintances, including what appears to be a pimp and a few prostitutes, await him. An orgy ensues and no sooner than the party is over and the guests dismissed a stretch limo arrives transporting two Russian prostitutes who immediately engage in a ménage a trois en petit (for Strauss-Kahn´s standards) comité. As if all of that wasn´t enough, the following morning, as the hotel maid comes to clean the room, a fresh-out-of-the-shower DSK grabs and ravages her, the rest being tabloid history.
Ferrara portrays DSK with more commiseration than condemnation, consistent with his usual portrayal of sex as an unrestrained force for disgrace. The style of Welcome to New York is much more sober and therefore effective than that of most of Ferrara´s previous output, and the film´s impact is also to no small amount to be credited to Dépardieu and to Jacqueline Bisset, elegance personified on the verge of 70, playing DSK long-suffering wife, apparently much more worried about her husband´s political career than about his emotional predicaments. The dialogue scenes between the two (in an NY apartment rented by DSK´s wife for him to await trial in house confinement, apparently at the cost of 60 thousand dollars/month, and promptly redecorated with original Gaugins and the like) are one of the films morceaux de bravure, the other being the jail scenes where DSK suffers his fall from grace at the hands of not particularly sympathetic police officers and inmates as a matter of course. Typically, Ferrara is much more interested in sex and its destructive potential than in politics, and it´s the latter that causes The MacMahonian´s only quibble with this otherwise excellent film: it suffers from the tendency, frequent since maybe the late 60s in American and European cinema, to portray the “corridors of power” as a sort of baroque continuing carrousel of luxury, corruption and excess, as though Presidents, Ministers etc. spend their lives sashaying from palatial suites to cocaine-fueled orgies and the like. Such mystification is but the flip side of mindless reverence and the perpetuation of such fantasized misconceptions does no service to the promotion of the clear-eyed citizenship needed to address the current state of political affairs.
That aside, Welcome to New York is a very pleasant surprise from a director The MacMahonian doesn´t usually hold in particular regard, and it features the second entry to the contest for best movie line of the year: court psychiatrist to DSK: “what do you think brought you to this situation?” DSK to psychiatrist “Je crois que c´est un peu ma faute”.